Carol Ann Duffy – “Havisham”
Adopting the persona of Charles Dickens’s infamous spinster, ‘Miss Havisham’, and delivered in the form of dramatic monologue, Duffy offers an insight into the disturbed psyche of this fiction character.
Expressing the speaker’s conflicting emotions in the oxymoronic opening line of the poem ‘Beloved sweetheart bastard’, Duffy’s Havisham is trapped in an emotional no-man’s-land, unable to relinquish her past feelings of love, yet seemingly powerless to move on from her lover’s rejection. Praying to a malevolent god to avenge her suffering, the intensity of her bitterness and anger is conveyed in the metaphoric imagery of the speaker’s unfeeling ‘dark green pebbles for eyes’ and the rope-like veins on the back of her hands, which elicit murderous intentions (ll. 3-4).
Emphasised in the caesura, the speaker explicates the source of her hatred in the second stanza: ‘Spinster. I stink and remember’. Through the allusion of the decaying wedding dress which paradoxically symbolises her spinsterhood, Duffy highlights the speaker’s masochistic nature, as she refuses to remove this painful reminder, despite the stench of corruption it exudes (l. 5). Self-pitying and self-loathing in equal measure, emphasised in the rambling effect of the enjambment, Duffy expresses the speaker’s lacerated sensibility in the wallowing and painful image of the rejected lover spending ‘Whole days in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall’ (ll. 5-6). Reduced to primitive language, the twisted image in the mirror prompts the rhetorical dissociation of selfhood: ‘her, myself, who did this to me?’ (ll. 8-9).
The speaker’s repulsion to her own savage nature is conveyed through the colour imagery in ‘Puce curses that are sounds not words’(l. 9). Rendered inarticulate by her all consuming hatred, the speaker’s former ‘fluent tongue’ now lucid only in the ‘mouth’ and ‘ear’ of the objectified lover: ‘Some nights better, the lost body over me,/ my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear’ (ll. 9-10). Indicating past sexual experiences in her explicitly erotic dreams, the implication of the speaker’s movement down before ‘suddenly bit[ing] awake’, suggests that the dream ends with the lover’s castration (l. 12).
Sardonically highlighting the irony of the oxymoronic, ‘Love’s/ hate behind a white veil’, the speaker suggests that the superficial mask of love, merely hides the undulating hatred beneath (l. 13). Alluding to her broken heart and appropriated virginity in the metaphor of ‘a red balloon bursting/ in my face’, it seems that the onomatopoeic ‘Bang’ indicates a sudden overwhelming desire to exact the consummation of her detestation on the male species in general, on the ‘long slow honeymoon’ of life (ll. 13-16).
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